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Conditional Formatting in Excel 5 Tips to

make you a Rockstar
Posted on March 13th, 2008 in All Time Hits , Analytics , Charts and Graphs , Featured , Learn
Excel - 311 comments

Excel conditional formatting is a hidden and

powerful gem that when used well, can change the
outlook of your project report / sales budget /
project plan or analytical outputs from bunch of raw
data in default fonts to something truly
professional and good looking. Better still, you dont
even need to be a guru or excel pro to achieve
dramatic results. All you need is some coffee and
this post to learn some cool conditional formatting
tricks.
So you got your coffee mug? well, lets start!
The 5 tricks we are going to learn are,
1. Highlighting alternative rows / columns in tables
2. No-nonsense project plans / gantt charts
3. Extreme Incell graphs
4. Highlight mistakes, errors, omissions, repetitions
5. Create intuitive dashboards
If you are new to Excel Conditional Formatting,
please read the Conditional Formatting Basics
article before proceeding.
I have created an excel sheet containing all these examples. Feel free to download the excel
and be a conditional formatting rock star

1. Highlighting alternative rows / columns in tables:

Often when you present data in
a large table it looks
monotonous and is difficult to
read. This is because your eyes
start interpreting the data as
grid instead of some important
numbers. To break this you try
highlighting or changing the
background color of alternative
rows / columns. But how would
you do this if you have rather
large table and it keeps
changing. The trick lies in Conditional Formatting. (Of course you can use the built-in auto
format feature, but we all know how the default settings of various Microsoft products are like).
First select data part of the table you want to format.
Go to Conditional formatting dialog (Menu > Format > Conditional Formatting)
Change the cell value is to formula is (YES, you can base your formatting outcome on
formulas instead of cell values)

Now, if you want to highlight alternative rows, the formula can go something like this,
=MOD(ROW(),2)=0
which means, whenever row() of the current cell is even, to change the coloring
to odd rows, you just need to put =MOD(ROW(),2)=1 as formula
Also, if you want to highlight alternative columns instead of rows you can use
the column() formula.
What if you want to change background color of every 3rd row instead, just use
=MOD(ROW(),3)=0 instead. Just use your imagination.
Set the format as you like, in my case I have used yellow color. When you are done, the
dialog should look something like this:

Click OK.
Congratulations, you have mastered a conditional formatting trick now

2. Creating a quick project plan / gantt chart using conditional formatting:

Project plans / gantt charts are everyday activity in most of our lives. Creating a simple and
snazzy project plan template in excel is not a difficult job, using conditional formatting a bit of
formulas you can do it no time.
First create a table structure like shown above, with columns like Activity, start and end
day, day 1, 2,3, etc
Now, whenever a day falls between start and end day for a corresponding activity, we
need to highlight that row. For that we need to identify whether a day falls between
start and end. We can do that with the below formulas,
=IF(AND(F$8>=$D9, F$8<=$E9),"1","")
Which means, whenever, the day number represented on the top row is between
start and end we will in 1 in the corresponding cell.
Next, whenever the cell value is 1, we will just fill the cell with a favorite color and
change the font to same color, so that we dont see anything but a highlighted cell,
better still, whenever you change the start or end dates, the color will change
automatically. This will be done by conditional formatting like below:

Congratulations, you have mastered the art of creating excel gantt charts now

3. Extreme In-cell Graphs:

Incell graphing is a nifty trick that basically uses REPT() function (used to repeat a string,
character given number of times) to generate bar-charts with in a cell. You can apply
conditional formatting on top of them to give the charts a good effect. Here is a sample:

The above is a table of visits to Chandoo.org

in the month of January 2008. As you can see I
have highlighted (by changing the font color to red and making it bold) for the cells that have
more than average number of visits in the month. I am not going to tell you how to do it, it is
your home work

4. Highlight mistakes / errors / omissions / repetitions using conditional

formatting:

Often we will do highly monotonous job like typing data in a sheet. Since the work is
monotonous you tend to make mistakes, omit a few or repeat something etc. This can be
avoided by conditional formatting. I use this trick whenever I am typing something or pasting a
formula over a rather large range of cells (for eg. vlookup on annual revenue data of all your
accounts, could run in to thousands of rows across multiple states /regions etc.).
Lets see how you can highlight a cell when it has an error:
First select the cells that you want to search for errors
Next go to menu > format > conditional formatting and mention the formula as:
=iserror()(see below)

In the same way you track repetitions, a simple countif()would do the magic for you, or
Omissions (again a countif())
Thats it, you have learned how to save tons of time by letting excel do the job for you.
Sit back and sip that coffee before it gets cold.

5. Creating dash boards using excel conditional formatting:

As I said before you can use conditional formatting to create intuitive sales reports or analytics
outputs. Like the one shown here,

Here is how you can do it:

Copy your data table to a new table.
Empty the data part and replace it with formula that can go like this (I am using the
above table format to write these formulas, may change for your data)
=ROUND(C10,0) & " " & IF(C9 Essentially, what we are doing is, whenever the cell
value is more than its predecessor in the data table we are appending the symbol
(go to menu > insert > symbols and look for the above one) etc.
Next, conditionally change the color of cell to red / green / blue or pink (if you want
and you are done
Show it to your boss, bask in the glory

I have created an excel sheet containing all these examples. Feel free to download the excel
and be a conditional formatting rock star.

More DIY Excel Training:

Excel for Beginners Tutorials
Excel Formula Examples
Pivot Tables
Project Management using Excel
Excel Dashboards
Advanced Excel
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311 Responses to Conditional Formatting in Excel 5 Tips to make you a

Rockstar
1. Create an Excel Gantt Chart with Conditional Formatting [Excel Tip] TechBlogger says:
March 14, 2008 at 1:21 am
[...] Gantt chart template here. Heres more on using conditional formatting in your
spreadsheets. Learn Cool Microsoft Excel Conditional Formatting Tricks [...]
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2. Metaholic 5 Cool Excel Conditional Formatting Tricks says:
March 14, 2008 at 2:20 am
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3. Metaholic 5 Cool Excel Conditional Formatting Tricks says:
March 14, 2008 at 2:20 am